Anger is a tricky thing. It can motivate people, but it can also repel. I wrote last week, for example, that antiwar protests are more effective when protesters are serious but not angry. That's because people who are not angry at the same things you are will be uncomfortable with your anger. If you want to persuade people to see your point of view, it helps to do it in a not-angry way.
Blogging, on the other hand, is not about persuasion as much as it is about peeling away layers of socially conditioned bullshit to get at bare-bones truth. A good blogger is an honest blogger. I'd say to any blogger that if you're angry, dig into yourself to find the source of your anger and blog it. Don't worry about what the neighbors will think.
http://culturekitchen.com/quotes/the_wisdom_in_anger
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Good Advice Behind the Words Too
Probably because righteously angry people aren't angry at "things" at all, but at PEOPLE, which makes it sound and feel like people have caused their anger and must be held to account.
So we protest for our "cause" -- meaning we "demonstrate" our anger and finger the people we blame for "causing" that anger, and try to whip up even more anger against them. No wonder it's uncomfortable!
Anger "causes" a power struggle between people. It's not effective against our targets, whoever they are. . .I've been the target of righteous mob anger, and it's scary all right, but hardly persuasive! Other people may jump in but most watch as they would any brawl, to see who wins and to keep from getting hit by stray broken bottles at the height of the action.
Seems to me the best that can come from social anger and political blame is a sort of capitulation (like the French, more than once?) which essentially means to lose one's head, and a beheaded person or people can't think, not even about how to change what they deplore.
I read the whole blogpost and saw provocative thoughts but overall, it slid past the central thing about all anger - Right, Left, artistic, marital, parental notwithstanding, anger is always about power, what you can make others do, and trying to take some power from others. Draw the line in the sand. Mad as hell and not gonna take it any more. This is why angry peace protests are especially disturbing and counterproductive. They prove the point they would deny.
Now THAT'S something I could get righteously angry about, if only I could blame somebody for causing it . . .